Based on what we’re learning about the plot, the cell, and how their plans were averted, National Review Online asked a group of experts: What’s the most important lesson we should take from the averted terrorist attack on Fort Dix? The following is M. Zuhdi Jasser's response:
News of the FBI’s arrests of six militant Islamists in New Jersey who plotted to kill our soldiers at Fort Dix was met yet again with the same tired responses of shock and dismissal from the mainstream media (MSM) and from major American Islamist organizations. An FBI agent poignantly noted that we “dodged another bullet.” The enemy is certainly rearming and germinating another cell somewhere. Rather than the same old tired minority politics, we in the Muslim community should be accepting the responsibility of cleaning our own house. More Muslims, more media, and more government officials should be noting that:
1) While most Muslims have never met militants like those arrested, Muslim organizations should understand that only Muslims hold the keys to the way to overwhelm and counter the ideology which fuels these radicals. Muslim organizations should be clamoring to expose and infiltrate the ideology and sources which drove these traitors to sprout their radical cell. We need an Islamic vaccine (the separation of spiritual Islam from political Islam) to the virus which afflicted these men. Until Muslim anti-Islamists can defeat Islamism (political Islam) as an ideology, we will not make any headway at preventing the germination of the next cell. We will only be left waiting, praying, for the FBI to help us, yet again, dodge the next bullet.
2) Will the FBI’s success here answer the question as to why we need to protect each and every citizen in America who practices the principle of “see something, say something” as the heroic video-store clerk (“John Doe”) did here? What if this “John Doe” had contrarily chosen to be silent due to a fear of litigation?
3) Will we continue to deny the fact that America is not exactly that far behind Europe in our susceptibility to homegrown terror cells?